About me

This blogname was derived from the novel The Secret Life Of Saeed The Pessoptimist by the Palestinian Israeli Emile Habiby: absurdism as weapon against the (ir)realities of daily life in Palestine/Israel. (The subtitle is from a book by Dutch author Renate Rubinstein. It could as well be my motto).
My real name is Martin (Maarten Jan) Hijmans. I've been covering the ME since 1977 and have been a correspondent in Cairo. I started my 'Abu Pessoptimist' blog in January 2009 out of anger during the onslaught in Gaza. The other one, The Pessoptmist, is meant to be a sister version in English. (En voor de Nederlandstaligen: ik wilde in november 2009 een tweede blog in het Engels beginnen en ontdekte te laat dat als je één account hebt, een profiel dan meteen ook voor allebei de blogs geldt. Vandaar dat het nu ineens in het Engels is... So sorry.)

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Jalal Talabani 1933 - 2017

Jalal Talabani, former Iraqi president and Kurdish politician, has died in Germany aged 84. He was Iraq's president from 2005 to 2014 and a key figure
in Iraqi Kurdistan, where voters last week overwhelmingly backed
independence in a controversial referendum. A family member said Talabani's health had taken a turn for the worse
and he been transported to Germany, along with his wife and two
children, before the referendum.
Talabani's death, following a decades-old struggle for
Kurdish statehood, came after Iraq's Kurds voted 92.7 percent to split
from Iraq in the September 25 referendum.
Talabani was an avuncular politician and a skilled negotiator, who
spent years building bridges between the country's divided factions,
despite his efforts for Kurdish independence.Born in 1933 in the mountain village of Kalkan, he studied
law at Baghdad University and did a stint in the army before joining the
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, father of
Masoud Barzani, current Kurdistan regional president.
Talabani took to the hills in a first uprising against the
Iraqi government in 1961 but famously fell out with Barzani, who sued
for peace with Baghdad, and joined a KDP splinter faction in 1964.
Eleven years later, he established the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK) after Barzani's forces, abandoned by their Iranian, US
and Israeli allies, were routed by Saddam Hussein's army.
Talabani became president in April 2005 after the first post-Saddam election in Iraq and continued in the post until 2014.
Iraq's head of state plays a largely ceremonial role and is elected by members of parliament.
In August 2008, the married father of two underwent
successful heart surgery in the USs, then in 2012 he was flown to
Germany after suffering a stroke, casting doubt over his ability to ever
return to Iraq.
He did go back in July 2014, with Iraq in crisis after the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group had taken control of
big expanses of the country.
Talabani was replaced by Fouad Masum as president following a parliamentary election.